Four women honored for 'Quiet Courage'

The Associated Press

Sunday

Nov 29, 2009 at 8:14 PM

A crowd recognized four North Florida women Sunday for their work in promoting civil and human rights at a ceremony honoring them as recipients of the 2009 Rosa Parks Quiet Courage Committee of Gainesville's Quiet Courage Award.

Although some spoke with a quiet voice, each woman's message was powerful.A crowd recognized four North Florida women Sunday for their work in promoting civil and human rights at a ceremony honoring them as recipients of the 2009 Rosa Parks Quiet Courage Committee of Gainesville's Quiet Courage Award.The award goes to those who, through their actions, display the same courage as Rosa Parks, a black woman who in 1955 refused to give up her seat on the bus to make room for a white passenger. Her actions became a symbol of the civil rights movement and launched a boycott of the Montgomery bus system.Mary Hall Daniels, 90, Cora Roberson, 85, Carol Thomas, 75, and Gwendolyn Zohara Simmons, 65, each spoke to more than 100 people gathered at Compassionate Outreach Ministries. Also honored was 17-year-old Dominique Jackson, a Hawthorne High School sophomore, who received the Legacy Bearer Award for her essay on Rosa Parks."Little people can change things. Things that seem unchangeable can be changed. I lived it," said Simmons. A professor at the University of Florida, she started working in 1964 with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as the SNCC, in Mississippi and spent more than year there. She also was on the staff of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that works for social justice and peace.Roberson was the first black teacher at an all-white Alachua County elementary school and became the first woman in the county to run for a commission seat. She recalled times when she had to walk to school because there was no bus for black children and blacks were served last at the store. "We were herded away from food counters like cattle," she said. But, she said, she was never frightened, even when she later in life received threats on her phone."I've never been one to be frightened by threats," she told the crowd.Daniels is one of two living survivors of the Rosewood massacre. In 1923, a white mob destroyed the Levy County town made up of mostly black residents after a false accusation that a black man had raped a white woman."I'm not angry," Daniels said about what had happened when she was a child, adding that God has been good to her.Daniels was being honored not only for surviving the massacre and injustices done to her and her family but teaching others about what had happened.Thomas served as a member of the Gainesville Women for Equal Rights, has been involved with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and was arrested twice, one when she helped expose the sexual exploitation of black female inmates in Gainesville by white male jailers and again for protesting the treatment of black leaders who she felt had been unjustly arrested. She recalled trying to get police to help after people, including members of the Ku Klux Klan, began circling her home because of her actions.As Thomas accepted her award, she said she wanted to put her arms around the world and help bring justice to it. Her words, like the other women's speeches, brought the crowd to their feet.

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